EDITORIAL – Custom-made disabilities wrong

Who wouldn’t love to have a custom-made suit or a custom-designed house? Having things made… Who wouldn’t love to have a custom-made suit or a custom-designed house? Having things made just for us, to our exact specifications, makes people feel special. It’s a good feeling, and for the right price it seems that you can have just about anything made – just for you.

But what if that “thing” is a living thing – a baby. We’ve had the “designer baby” debate before, and we’re just not comfortable with the idea of genetically engineering children. Kids are only kids for a small portion of their lives, and then they become adults – people. Parents are influential in developing the people their children become, but is it fair to make decisions for them, decisions they will have to live with for their entire lives, before they are even born? No.

A recent survey indicates that the designer baby issue is moving in the opposite direction, the Associated Press reports. Some parents aren’t trying to build tall, blue-eyed, healthy babies for themselves. Some parents want children just like them – even if it means that these children are engineered to be deaf or to have dwarfism. Slate magazine calls it “deformer babies